Top 60 Witold Quotes
#1. Authors I've longed to write like - but realize I actually can't even begin to - include Poe, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Kafka, Daniil Kharms, Witold Gombrowicz, Emily Dickinson, Robert Walser, Barbara Comyns, Ntozake Shange, Camille Laurens, Zbigniew Herbert, and Jose Saramago.
Helen Oyeyemi
#2. Bizarrely, I am convinced that a writer incapable of talking about himself is not a complete writer. - WITOLD GOMBROWICZ,
Clive James
#3. Architecture is an applied art, founded not on theories but on practice.
Witold Rybczynski
#4. Wherever I see some mystique, be it virtue or family, faith or fatherland, there I must commit some indecent act.
Witold Gombrowicz
#5. Joey, it's high time, dear child. What will people say? If you don't want to be a doctor, at least be a womanizer, or a fancier of horses, be something ... be something definite ...
Witold Gombrowicz
#6. Don't change the beggar into a conqueror, because it was the beggar who led you to conquest.
Witold Gombrowicz
#8. I placed no trust in faiths, doctrines, ideologies, institutions. Thus I could stand only upon my own feet. But I was a Pole, molded by Polishness, living in Poland. And so I needed to look deeper for my 'self,' in the place where it was no longer Polish but simply human
Witold Gombrowicz
#9. A novel which I called Pornografia. At that time it wasn't such a bad title, today, in view of the excess of pornography, it sounds banal, and in a few languages it was changed to Seduction.
Witold Gombrowicz
#10. You, oh mature ones, keep company solely with other mature ones, and your maturity is so mature that it can only chum up with maturity!
Witold Gombrowicz
#11. A hanged sparrow! Who would ever think of hanging a sparrow? It's like flavoring borscht with two mushrooms instead of just one - it's too much!
Witold Gombrowicz
#13. I didn't go to the lectures. My valet, who was more distinguished than I, went instead.
Witold Gombrowicz
#14. The individual is a nut so impossible to crack that no theoretic tooth will be able to manage it. And so nothing will be able to justify your defeat, bumblers!
Witold Gombrowicz
#15. I am reading Sienkiewicz. What tormenting reading. What a powerful genius! And there never was such a first-rate writer of the second-rate class.
Witold Gombrowicz
#16. A universal style is one that knows how to embrace lovingly those not quite developed.
Witold Gombrowicz
#17. I became bold because I had absolutely nothing to lose: neither honors, nor earnings, nor friends. I had to find myself anew and rely only on myself, because I could rely on no one else. My form is my solitude.
Witold Gombrowicz
#18. It is not without pleasure that i can tell my majestic colleagues who write for humanity, and in the name of humanity, that i have never written a single word other than for a selfish purpose; but at, each time, the work betrayed me and escaped from me
Witold Gombrowicz
#19. The difference between western and eastern intellectuals is that the former have not been kicked in the ass enough.
Witold Gombrowicz
#20. There may be fewer people in the American house of the nineties, but there are a lot more things.
Witold Rybczynski
#21. The emptiness of our boredom met with the emptiness of these supposed signs.
Witold Gombrowicz
#25. Not surprisingly, because too much attention to one object leads to distraction, this one object conceals everything else, and when we focus on one point on the map we know that all other points are eluding us.
Witold Gombrowicz
#26. Television watching should more properly be called television staring; it engages eye and ear simultaneously in a relentless and persistent way and leaves no room for daydreaming. This is what makes watching such an inferior form of leisure
Witold Rybczynski
#27. So they didn't let anybody else off. I can't live like this, I'm finished. Auschwitz was easy.
Witold Pilecki
#28. For where else, if not in the home, can we let our imagination wander?
Witold Rybczynski
#29. Great poetry must be admired, because it is great and because it is poetry, and so we admire it.
Witold Gombrowicz
#31. People whose sensibility is destroyed by music in trains, airports, lifts, cannot concentrate on a Beethoven Quartet.
Witold Lutoslawski
#32. Average intelligence loves blinders, which facilitate an even trot; but a brisker and livelier intelligence desires uncertainty, risk, a play of more deceptive and elusive forces ... where one can preserve flight, pride, joke, confession, rapture, play, struggle.
Witold Gombrowicz
#33. Against the background of general freakishness the case of my particular freakishness was lost.
Witold Gombrowicz
#34. A man fighting for his life can do more than he ever imagined he could.
Witold Pilecki
#35. Many a beauty in her own room behaves repulsively till one splits one's sides.
Witold Gombrowicz
#36. Serious literature does not exist to make life easy but to complicate it.
Witold Gombrowicz
#37. I carried out my orders until arrested. I had no sense that I was spying, and I ask that this be taken into account in deciding my verdict.
Witold Pilecki
#38. The most beautiful house in the world is the one that you build for yourself.
Witold Rybczynski
#39. The truth is that a nineteenth-century warehouse exhibits greater craft in its construction than all but the most expensive modern buildings.
Witold Rybczynski
#40. There are scores of books offering 'solutions' to sprawl. Their authors would do well to read this book.
Witold Rybczynski
#41. Any artist who respects himself ought to be, and in every sense of the term, an emigre.
Witold Gombrowicz
#42. You are ugly when you love her, you are beautiful and fresh, vital and free, modern and poetic when you don't ... you are more beautiful as an orphan than as your mother's son.
Witold Gombrowicz
#43. Words alone can rarely justify censorship. If we censor words themselves without looking at the context, we could shut down much of the entertainment industry.
Witold Walczak
#45. Two conspirators with a frog, following the line of a whiffletree.
Witold Gombrowicz
#46. There is nothing that the mature hate more, there is nothing that disgusts them more, than immaturity
Witold Gombrowicz
#47. I am very afraid of the devil. A strange confession from the lips of an unbeliever.
Witold Gombrowicz
#48. To contradict, even in little matters, is the supreme necessity of art today.
Witold Gombrowicz
#49. Great! I've written something stupid, but I haven't signed a contract with anyone to produce solely wise and perfect works. I gave vent to my stupidity ... and here I am, reborn.
Witold Gombrowicz
#50. The reporters are needed to validate the historical record.
Witold Walczak
#51. Man is profoundly dependent on the reflection of himself in another man's soul, be it even the soul of an idiot.
Witold Gombrowicz
#52. My literature must remain that which it is. Especially that something which does not fit into politics and does not want to serve it. I cultivate just one politics: my own. I am a separate state.
Witold Gombrowicz
#54. It was too late to retreat - the world exists only because it is always too late to retreat.
Witold Gombrowicz
#55. The world was indeed a kind of screen and did not manifest itself other than by passing me on and on - I was just the bouncing ball that objects played with!
Witold Gombrowicz
#57. There were three of us; Witkiewicz, Bruno Schulz, and myself
the three muskateers of the Polish avant-garde between the wars. Only Witkiewicz remains to be discovered.
Witold Gombrowicz
#58. It is in the prime of youth that man sinks into empty phrases and grimaces. It's in this smithy that our maturity is forged.
Witold Gombrowicz
#59. Isn't it true (I thought), that one is almost never present, or rather never fully present, and that's because we have only a halfhearted, chaotic and slipshod, disgraceful and vile relationship with out surroundings.
Witold Gombrowicz
#60. During the first 3 years at Auschwitz, 2 million people died; over the next 2 years - 3 million.
Witold Pilecki
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